Steve Jobs is a fantastic biography by Walter Isaacson. He explores the growth of the personal computer industry (and of course the MP3 music player industry, cell phones, tablets and everything that Apple has had a part in) in a way that is interesting and completely readable. I have to make it a 5-Star Read,…
Category Archives: 5 Star Reads
The Starlite Drive-in
The discovery of human remains at the old Starlite Drive-In theatre brings up in razor-sharp detail the events of the summer of 1956 for Callie Anne Benton. The drive-in bounded her world and that of her parents—her father managed the place, out in the country several miles from the nearest town, and her mother, suffering…
11/22/63
Stephen King has written over 50 books, all of them bestsellers, and most of them horror. But before you click off to the next review, let me try to persuade you that 11/22/63 is not typical Stephen King. King has a tendency to include too many characters, too much fluff in the middle, too much…
Cybils Middle Grade Fiction: Family Stories
These Cybils Middle Grade Fiction nominees all deal with families. These families might look like your own, or they might be quite different, but the dynamic plays out in a critical way to the plot of these novels, which are each different in tone as well. Calli Be Gold by Michele Weber Hurwitz I have…
Stasiland, a 5-Star Read
When I was a child in the 70s, I used to sometimes lie awake at night and worry about the Communists. All the stories I’d heard terrified me, and I had nightmares about my parents being shot by them; why exactly was unclear. When the Berlin Wall fell, I was amazed. It seemed to have…
Some Cybils Fiction Reviews — Middle School Magic
This is my second year as a Cybils Middle Grade Fiction round I panelist (this category is for realistic fiction, aimed at ages 8 – 12, or the “middle grades” of 3 – 6ish). That means that I am supposed to read as many as possible of the nominated books (We are over 100 and…
Wonderstruck
Brian Selznick broke all paradigms with The Invention of Hugo Cabret –a thick chunkster of a novel that is more than half pictures. A story for the older elementary reader (and up) that is filled with beautiful pictures that help tell the story? Unheard of. Wonderstruck follows this same pattern, and I loved it! I…
Breadcrumbs, a 5-Star Read with Giveaway
While I’ve been an avid reader my whole life, up until a few years ago, it had been a long, long time since I had experienced what’s known as “middle grade fiction.” Not since I was in the 9 to 12 age range had I read this genre, but it reentered my life a while…
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